In this blog post, we will examine the complex relationship between autonomy and dependence revealed through everyday life studies and the ambiguity of their boundaries.
In German historiography, everyday life studies emerged in the late 1970s amid critical reflections on social history. This new research trend originated from concerns about the traditional approach to social history, which had been mainstream until then. Traditional social history focused on macro-level discourses such as industrialization, class structure, and the formation of nation-states, and concentrated on analyzing the structural changes and processes of modern society. This approach focused on elucidating the operating principles of systems, institutions, and structures in society as a whole, rather than the everyday experiences of individuals or small groups.
At the time, the representative trend in social history research was based on modernization theory and critical theory, which focused on elucidating how structural factors such as the state, economy, and class functioned within the context of large historical trends. In other words, this approach tended to view collective structures and institutions rather than individual humans as the subjects of history, and to interpret the driving forces of historical development as structural changes and institutional reforms.
However, researchers of everyday history raised serious questions about this structure-centered approach to historical narration. They focused on the sacrifices and oppression that existed behind the progress and development brought about by modernization, as well as the issues of human subjectivity and experience that were revealed in everyday life. Everyday history sought to restore those who had been marginalized in history by shedding light on the lives of individuals who had been pushed to the periphery within the macro framework.
It was an attempt to view individuals not simply as the “background” of history, but as subjects of concrete practices, and to rediscover historical meaning in the everyday context in which they lived. From this perspective, everyday history research focuses on the concrete lives of people living and breathing in a specific time and space, rather than on anonymous structures or abstract historical processes. This is not a simple shift in focus, but a paradigm shift in historical writing itself.
In particular, researchers of everyday history brought to the forefront groups that had been overlooked by traditional historiography, such as workers, women, children, and local communities, and focused on the specific aspects of their lives and experiences. Through the lifestyles and practices of those who had been marginalized by history, they sought to reveal that history is not unilaterally determined by structure, but rather a space for human action and interpretation.
As a result, the subject matter and approach of everyday history have become much more diverse over time. Initially, it focused mainly on the daily lives of workers and the lower classes, but it has since expanded its academic horizons to include the cultures, emotions, use of time, and even micro-level elements such as body movements of individuals and groups with diverse social identities. Today, everyday history has gone beyond a mere sub-discipline of history and established itself as an alternative form of historical narration.
This everyday approach has created two different perspectives for understanding the relationship between human actions and structures in history. These are the “perspective of subordination” and the “perspective of autonomy.”
These two perspectives stem from different interpretations of whether individuals in everyday life are beings defined by structures or subjects who actively act according to their own judgments and choices. From the perspective of subordination, modern society has become increasingly organized and mechanized, suppressing individual autonomy.
For example, people living in high-rise apartments in the suburbs of large cities in Germany in the 1960s had to rely on complex technological devices and facilities. They had little room to adjust or control their daily lives. As technology and systems came to govern almost every aspect of life, individuals became increasingly dependent on the functioning of structures.
Everyday life became a space governed by conditions and rules set from outside, rather than a space for autonomous practice. This reality clearly shows how deeply structures had penetrated individual lives. Everyday life under totalitarian regimes is a particularly extreme example of this kind of dependent structure. During the Nazi era in Germany, state power penetrated even the private sphere of individuals’ lives. Strong organization, a thorough surveillance system, a combination of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, and image strategies for mass agitation completely controlled the daily lives of individuals. In this process, personal privacy was no longer private, but became subject to management and control by state power, a phenomenon that can be explained by the concept of the “politicization of privacy.” However, important insights can also be found from a different perspective, namely that of autonomy.
This perspective focuses on the differences in the autonomy and actions of individuals in their daily lives, rather than emphasizing the unilateral influence of the structure. Research tracing how the genocide of Jews was carried out in Poland under German occupation during World War II reveals the complexity of such autonomous actions. Although all those who participated in the genocide received the same orders, they accepted and carried out those orders in different ways.
Some actively followed orders, while others went beyond the instructions and committed excessive violence, and still others resorted to subtle resistance or avoidance strategies. Thus, even within the same structure, individuals produced diverse behaviors through different choices and judgments. Furthermore, even under a totalitarian regime, people did not always conform or obey completely.
Many practiced political indifference or distanced themselves from the regime by focusing on their private lives, and sometimes even engaged in acts of resistance, either covertly or openly. These acts can be considered meaningful political practices in themselves, suggesting that everyday life is not simply a space of oppression, but a dynamic space with the potential for subtle resistance and disruption. This trend can be summarized as the “privatization of politics,” which is noteworthy in that political power does not withdraw from the private sphere, but rather the private sphere becomes a venue for political practice.
Ultimately, these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, but show the dual structure of power and practice in everyday life that operate simultaneously. The “politicization of private life” and the “privatization of politics” are not simply opposing concepts, but rather intertwined and overlapping concepts that explain the complexity of the workings of power in everyday life. Individuals are subject to oppressive structures, but at the same time, they are autonomous agents who can disrupt or reconfigure those structures. Therefore, everyday life is not a simple reflection of structure, but a space with the potential for social change and reconfiguration.
In this context, everyday life studies seek to reveal how human actions reflect structures and how they crack those structures and bring about change. This is not merely a matter of recording the past, but also an attempt to delicately capture the texture of concrete lives within the grand narrative of history and, through this, transform existing perceptions of history. In particular, everyday life narratives do not view identity as a fixed, singular entity, but rather as something multi-layered and changeable. This makes it possible to visualize the lives and possibilities of socially vulnerable groups, which were not visible in existing historiography, as well as the complexity of their existence.
Ultimately, it is important to understand that the practices carried out by actors in the space of everyday life are not simply passive reactions to “what is given,” but are sometimes active acts of constructing the world and assigning meaning to it. From this, we can more accurately capture how the “given” and the “self-created” are intertwined and how their ratio is visualized in everyday life. The narration of everyday life is a historical endeavor that deals with this complexity and subtlety, and it contains important keys to understanding the past and the present that we have not yet fully grasped.
